This invention relates to a radiator for vehicles, and more particularly to a radiator of this kind which has improved mountability into vehicles.
In a vehicle such as a motorcycle equipped with a water-cooled engine, a radiator for radiating the heat of hot engine cooling water is usually arranged between a frontfork supporting the front wheel and front portions of the side frame members. Such type radiator is constructed such that an inlet tank and an outlet tank are spaced from and communicated with each other by means of a plurality of juxtaposed tubes, with cooling fins interposed between adjacent ones of the tubes. Hot cooling water supplied from the engine flows into the inlet tank, and then it is cooled as it travels in the tubes, and again discharged through the outlet tank to be supplied to the engine.
As noted above, the conventional radiator has a structure wherein the inlet tank and the outlet tank are spaced from each other. As a consequence, in mounting such conventional radiator into a small space in a motorcycle or a like vehicle, it is difficult to mount connection pipes in the space for connection with the water inlet and water outlet of the radiator without interference of them with the front wheel and other peripheral parts. This forms a factor for degradation in the mountability of the radiator into the vehicle.
On the other hand, in a conventional vehicle such as a motorcycle, a radiator called "oil cooler" is provided in a circulation line of lubricating oil for lubrication of sliding parts of the engine, to cool hot lubricating oil. Such oil cooler in general has a structure wherein two plate members each formed with a groove are stuck together in face-to-face contact so that the grooves of the two plate members cooperate to form a heat radiating passage for the lubricating oil. Since the water-cooling radiator and the oil cooler are thus different in structure, they have to be fabricated on separate production lines. By this reason, conventionally two radiators with different structures but with the same function of cooling fluid are mounted into a vehicle independently of each other. This necessitates providing a vehicle with two exclusive mounting spaces for mounting the radiator and the oil cooler, and mounting the radiator and the oil cooler into these respective mounting spaces independently of each other. Paticularly in a small-sized vehicle such as a motorcycle which cannot aford providing large mounting spaces, it is difficult to mount a plurality of radiators into limited mounting spaces, resulting in an increase in the manufacturing cost of the vehicle.